I have been following this on a few Venezuelan blogs. The entire saga has been amazing, but the American media has largely ignored it. I assume because Chavez is a darling of the left and he had his fingerprints all over this. Also because several prominent Democrats were implicated in working to help FARC. (Basically, Chavez has purchased their support with bribes of cheap oil to poor people in their districts.)

You can forgive others from being jealous about the attention she got, but not the friend who knew going in what she was like.

She didn't have a friend with her, she had an aide, someone who was paid to be around her. The aide was kidnapped, not there of her own accord. Also the aide was raped and had her baby taken from her and used as some weird political pawn. So give her some slack.

Victoria, you kind of sound in love with Ingrid Betancourt from your description of her. That must have been some good propaganda you saw.

Queen Victoria - "Ever since I saw an cable documentary about her, which included her run for the Presidency, I realised that a diplomat's daughter and ex-Miss Colombia would have this kind of envy leveled at her."

I feel there is an untold story in the fact that Ingrid's former aide "became pregnant" while in captivity. This suggests she was f***ing FARC.

Simplest story is that she was raped in captivity, whether by brute force or coercion.

The savages here are the kidnapping militants. I don't ultimately care whether some people behave worse than others when in fear of their lives and played against their fellow captives. I hope we can celebrate courage and noble behavior without getting a salacious pleasure out of the much more common human frailty.

Victoria, you kind of sound in love with Ingrid Betancourt from your description of her. That must have been some good propaganda you saw.

I don't get it.

I was being neutral in saying it's evident to me that she would've been envied, given her background and the fact that she received 99% of the attention in captivity. Then I said that it tells you something when a friend (it was a friend, BTW, as much as an aide) turns against her, not just people who never dealt with her in civilian life.

Alongside tales of heroism, there were numerous stories about betrayal, collaboration, and calumny among Jews in concentration camps and Cambodians in Khmer Rouge labor camps.

Captives are held to a higher standard, a noble military one, which requires a flawless heroism, one unseen in daily life, where few resist even the mildest coercion in office politics.

The captors, however, seem to carry little or no blame, if there is any discussion about them at all.

I used to find this odd, a double standard where the real offenders, the kidnappers, the militant utopians, these vicious ideologues, are not held in utter contempt, when one should spit before saying their names, and pray after , that they should be decried as inhuman and evil at every opportunity.

But they are not. Fascism only begets this response, hence Godwin's law. But all of the similar acts in the 20th century and since then have not been so judged. Three guesses why.

I watched that video of Ms. Betancourt a while back and I got the vibe that she could be massively annoying. I certainly wouldn't want to be stuck in the jungle with her.

Still, it's a little unseemly for the hostages to be bitching about other hostages, unless they were in league with the enemy or something. And they could hardly tell. People in hostage situations might very easily play along with their captors to try to protect themselves, and I think it's probably especially hard for women.

Jason (the commenter) I also did not understand your remarks to Victoria. I thought she was being neutral to even mildly critical of Betancourt.

One thing we need to understand is that people communicate on different levels and we can be very successful on one level and not another. Some people do great one-on-one, but are terrified to speak in front of a crowd. Others have great presence, even charisma in front of crowds or a camera, but struggle to relate to people on a more intimate level.

Betancourt has enormous charisma, but she may well be awkward on the personal level. She may also simply be an egomaniac. I don't know.

Add in the other factors: guns, rapists, the Stockholm Syndrome, the jungle, hunger, thirst, the media, book deals, etc. and you have a complicated brew.

I saw her interview with Larry King after she was freed. She was very impressive. She had a sensitive, expressive face and spoke of her captivity with sadness and civility. One of her quotes stuck in my mind: "The things that happened in the jungle should stay in the jungle."....All the captives were subjected to enormous amounts of stress and deprivation. It's a fair guess that some of them did not behave well. Their bad behavior, however, reflects the barbarity of their captors and not their own lack of moral character......Here are some morals the left will never draw: John McCain and his fellow POW's were a bunch of off the chart terrific heroes. As captors, Marxists are pigs--far, far worse pigs than the prison guards at Attica or Gitmo or any of the other prisons where the blood from the bleeding hearts of liberals congeals and draws flies.

"Add in the other factors: guns, rapists, the Stockholm Syndrome, the jungle, hunger, thirst, the media, book deals, etc. and you have a complicated brew."

I would agree to that, just adding "political beliefs" and questioning the definition of Stockholm Syndrome. And the only media that commented on her relationship was a left leaning one, and they said, after interviewing her, the relationship was consensual. (Commondreams.org). I can understand taking offense at the vulgarity of my comment, but why Victoria's?!

It just seems like everybody is lining up taking predictable sides on something we actually have no knowledge about, so have fun, I'm going to work.

And the only media that commented on her relationship was a left leaning one, and they said, after interviewing her, the relationship was consensual.

I think it's hard to say that anything is truly consensual when you are being held hostage for 5 years. I mean, if you were allowed to leave would you still be hanging out with the guy? Then maybe it's consensual. If she goes back to him, then maybe I'll buy that (but I'll still think she's probably messed up in the head).

I hope we can celebrate courage and noble behavior without getting a salacious pleasure out of the much more common human frailty.

I might be missing something, but what was the noble behavior and courage? She got kidnapped because she ignored government warnings want went campaigning in FARC-controlled areas. After that her options were (a) living in captivity or (b) death. She chose (a). It seems to me that she behaved foolishly and ended up putting everyone through a lot of trouble as a result. But maybe I don't know the whole story.

I intended the comment to mean that when we can celebrate heroism, we should, but we shouldn't then set that as the bar for what we expect of people. I didn't mean to say there were any particularly noble or heroic people in this story.

Well, true to Deranger form, the first three responses appear to be from lefties, who are once again somehow able to respond first in a libertarian/conservative post. I stand by my charge that many leftist/liberals subscribe to websites of their political opposites only to get e-mail notice of new posts so that they may taint and befoul a thread before any serious conservative/libertarian commenters can (Those who have jobs and and don't have an obsessive-compulsive need to leap to the first comment in a site they disagree with virtually 100% of the time)). This means such left/liberal multi-site first-commenters have an immense amount of time to cruise the web, ready to punce in an instant.

As to Maguro's comment ("Hardly surprising that people who were imprisoned together would start to get on each other's nerves. I'm sure lots of the inmates at Riker's Island don't particularly care for their cellmates either.") - did you not read the article? (Of course not - that would have slowed you down in making that first "anti-comment".) The basis of the author's complaint is that Ms. Betancourt, in order to ensure her personal security, eventually made common cause with the guerillas, and even went so far as to "J'accuse" the Americans of being CIA. Incredible. That could have been a death sentence. Calling it the equivalent of a falling out between criminals serving a prison sentence is insulting to the intellect as well as to the victims of Ms. Betancourt's craven and self-centered betrayals.

One other comment about FARC and the hostage rescue. The fight against FARC during Bush Admin was pretty successful and done with a small footprint and what passes for cheaply in DC. But it would have been a lot simpler to legalize the drug traffic and cut-off the money line to the FARC. To the extent that there is a global war against extremists, terrorists, criminal gangs and communist dead-enders, legalizing drug traffic is a kind of flanking maneuver that cuts across key enemy supply lines. At the same time it broadens the tax base, so it is one anti-dote to the tendency to try to extract more and more tax dollars from fewer and fewer people.

Today someone sent me an email and told me it was ingrid betancourt, I believe it was her myself now. It was a video of a gang rape while she was in captivity, this wasnt something she wanted, she was terribly raped, i couldnt believe this was in my email nor how the hell it got on the internet but its disturbing and what they were doing to her was terrible and attrocious. That wasnt an affair, that was a rape.